Facebook Unveils Graph Search, A People-Powered Search Engine

We're at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where the company has invited us to "see what we're building," according to the invitation we got last week.

What it's building: Graph Search, a powerful new search engine which people can use to find people, places, photos, and interests, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

Engineers demonstrated how the search tools can be used for recruiting, dating, and local-business searches, among others, launching Facebook into competition with a host of companies it hadn't previously threatened directly.

Hundreds of thousands of people currently have access to the new search tool, a small fraction of Facebook's user base.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search was very different from Google and Microsoft's Web search, though it does use Microsoft's Bing as a backup when it can't find relevant answers within Facebook's databases.

There are "three pillars" of Facebook.

"Today we're going to talk about the third."

"Is it things that my friends like? Is it photos of my friends doing things? Is it places my friends have been to? What's more interesting than giving people all of these things is letting people query any cut of that database.

Apps figure into this.

Another example:

Zuckerberg wanted to do a TV viewing party for HBO's "Game of Thrones." So he searched for "People who live near Palo Alto who like Game of Thrones." The results are sorted by signals like number of mutual friends.

Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen headed up the project.

Stocky is showing off Graph Search.

Graph Search automatically suggests simple phrases that guide the user to the kind of searches it can answer, like "Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter." It's more structured, less open-ended than Web search.

Searches actually create a page on Facebook.com.

When Zuckerberg discussed the project with Stocky and Rasmussen, he declared it "impossible."

Zuckerberg: "My immediate reaction is that it's awesome, but it's impossible. I thought that this couldn't be done, but like any good Facebook team would do, they took this as a challenge. A few months later they had a version that was basically working."

Now Lars Rasmussen is showing potentially commercial searches.

Very detailed restaurant searches.

For example, Indian restaurants liked by friends who are from India, high-end restaurants liked by friends who have attended the Culinary Institute, bars in Dublin, Ireland, sorted by people who live there.

Along with search, Facebook is showing off new privacy tools.

Zuckerberg takes the stage back.

Facebook is aware that people are going to worry about search exposing information that was previously buried in the past—a similar concern that they had when Timeline allowed people to more easily see older updates.

Facebook's introduction of new tools like Privacy Shortcuts was a building block for this.

Tech blogger Robert Scoble asks if there's an API for app developers.

Josh Constine of TechCrunch asks is there will be ads in search.

"This could potentially be a business over time," Zuckerberg says. He points out that Facebook has had sponsored search results—suggestions that appear as users type queries—for a while, and nothing's changing with that ad product.